Japan and China Will Meet Up & more – 14th Nov 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 14th of November twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Thursday, the 9th, a Japanese secretary-general went to Beijing, China, to arrange a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. The conference begins on Wednesday the 15th, and the sideline meeting will take place on Thursday the 16th.

It will be the first meeting between the two leaders in almost a year. Kishida will likely ask President Xi to lift the ban on Japanese seafood imports. In turn, the Chinese leader will probably tell Kishida to stop getting between them and Taiwan since Japan has recently been very friendly with Taiwanese officials, even though China considers Taiwan a province and not an independent country. So, Japan should engage with China directly, not with Taiwan.

One diplomat said that they expect the meeting to produce some results since Xi wouldn’t have agreed to a meeting if “all they do is meet.”

Speaking of China, its increased maritime activity is only making things worse. Because of the increased activity, Japan, the US, Canada, and Australia began a joint drill on Friday the 10th that lasted several days. They invited members of the media onto a US aircraft carrier to watch the four-way drill. Japan’s commander-in-chief said that strong coordination was important to keep the region safe and secure. A US vice admiral backed this up, saying that this region’s security was important to the entire world.

Meanwhile, in an update to a story from a previous show, the Cabinet approved the draft for the economic stimulus package’s budget on Friday the 10th. The total budget is around 127 trillion yen or 800 billion dollars and includes the tax cuts and benefits to low-income households we talked about last week. It also invests money into inflation relief and certain industries that might help boost the economy, such as the 2 trillion yen or 12 billion dollars thrown at domestic chip production. Government bonds will fund a third of the extra spending.

Opposition parties said that since the tax cuts won’t go into effect until June twenty twenty-four, they’ll be too little, too late, and that lowering consumption tax would be a lot more helpful. The move was also called into question as the new government bonds only add further to a debt that’s already twice the size of the GDP.

Maybe they’ll be able to make a dent in that debt by pulling out of some higher-ups’ pockets. The Diet is currently considering a bill to increase the salary of Cabinet ministers by 320,000 yen or 2,100 dollars per year, and the prime minister’s wage by 460,000 yen or 3,000 dollars.

The bill was put into question because the public is struggling with inflation, and opposition parties pointed out that the salary hikes are higher than the tax cuts from the stimulus package proposed last week. So, on Thursday the 9th, the Cabinet Secretary told reporters that if the bill is approved, the prime minister and other top officials would return the salary increase to the treasury. He also asked for people’s understanding and pointed out that many in the private sector are also seeing wages go up, and that the pay-raise bill is in line with wage increases for civil servants.

Returning their salary bumps is certainly a nice gesture, but it’s a bit hard to take in good faith considering how one high-up government official, State Minister of Finance Kenji Kanda, just recently confessed to tax dodging. More specifically, a company that Kanda owns didn’t pay its taxes, not once, not twice, but four different times. Kanda blamed the repeated “mistakes” on an accounting firm that he’d been using.

Kanda ended up resigning on Monday the 13th, and the government has already announced that a former state minister will replace him. Makes sense - who needs a minister of finance who can’t keep his own finances together?

A recent national news poll showed on Monday the 13th that the approval rating of Kishida’s Cabinet fell to twenty-nine percent, which is the lowest it’s ever been since Kishida took office. Disapproval has also gone up and is now at fifty-two percent. It’s a sharp contrast to last month, when approval was at thirty-six percent and disapproval was forty-four percent.

Most people who disapprove said they had low expectations for the Cabinet’s policies or that it wouldn’t be able to implement them.

In science news, officials recently spoke on their plans to give a trillion yen or six billion dollars to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, over the next decade. They aim to use these funds to double the domestic space market from twenty-six to fifty-two billion dollars by the early twenty thirties. The government hopes that large-scale and long-term aid will get businesses excited about launching into the space industry. For now, 2 billion dollars of the budget drafted on Friday the 10th is dedicated to science- and economy-related ministries.

That’s not the only thing JAXA’s up to. They will launch a rocket carrying a government satellite on the 11th of January. The satellite will be able to take zoomed-in pictures of the Earth and will be used to keep track of North Korean missile launch sites and figure out damages from natural disasters.

Moving onto business news, leading telecommunications company NTT said it’s partnering with US startup May Mobility to make self-driving buses and taxis. NTT hopes to start testing self-driving buses and taxis by twenty twenty-five and will invest around ten billion yen or sixty-six million dollars.

It’s not the first time May Mobility has partnered with Japanese companies. Before this, insurer Tokio Marine and a Toyota-linked venture capital firm also invested in the company.

Meanwhile, NTT said in October that it plans to team up with Honda and General Motors to start a driverless ride service in Japan in twenty twenty-six.

In sports news, the Japanese Major League baseball star Shohei Ohtani made an Instagram post on Thursday the 9th. He announced his plans to donate three baseball gloves to every grade school in Japan, giving away 60,000 gloves. He said he hoped that the children would enjoy playing baseball and lead energetic lives. A sporting goods company that sponsors Ohtani will distribute one left-handed and two right-handed baseball gloves to each of the 20,000 grade schools from December to March.

Ohtani's contract with the Los Angeles Angels recently ended after his nomination for the American League Most Valuable Player Award. Since then, many other Major League teams, including the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers, have shown interest in recruiting Ohtani.

In a follow-up to a story we covered on a previous show, the Meteorological Agency officially announced on Thursday, the 9th, that the islet formed from a volcanic eruption late last month is now a new piece of land. But they also said that since it’s still pretty small, it could go back under the water over time.

The agency also said that there have been a lot of volcanic quakes on the island of Kuchinoerabujima in Kagoshima Prefecture since early November. On Wednesday, the 8th alone, the area had 320 earthquakes.

And that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us! Before we leave, we wanted to thank everyone who has been listening to us, and welcome all the new subscribers! We are happy the Rorshok Japan community is growing!

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Mata Ne!